John von Neumann
John von Neumann
John von Neumannwas a Hungarian-American pure and applied mathematician, physicist, inventor, computer scientist, and polymath. He made major contributions to a number of fields, including mathematics, physics, economics, computing, and statistics...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth28 December 1903
CountryUnited States of America
elephants four fit
With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.
problem uncertain term
Problems are often stated in vague terms... because it is quite uncertain what the problems really are.
world responsible being-responsible
You don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in.
believe space may
I would like to make a confession which may seem immoral: I do not believe in Hilbert space anymore.
thinking important bombs
I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers.
moon men climate
Technological possibilities are irresistible to man. If man can go to the moon, he will. If he can control the climate, he will.
discovery years desire
By and large it is uniformly true that in mathematics there is a time lapse between a mathematical discovery and the moment it becomes useful; and that this lapse can be anything from 30 to 100 years, in some cases even more; and that the whole system seems to function without any direction, without any reference to usefulness, and without any desire to do things which are useful.
trying interpretation certain
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work-that is, correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area.
math thinking achievement
The calculus was the first achievement of modern mathematics and it is difficult to overestimate its importance. I think it defines more unequivocally than anything else the inception of modern mathematics; and the system of mathematical analysis, which is its logical development, still constitutes the greatest technical advance in exact thinking.
talking programming precise
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.
meteorology unstable process
All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.
mean science numbers
Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.
thinking depth mathematics
The total subject of mathematics is clearly too broad for any of us. I do not think that any mathematician since Gauss has covered it uniformly and fully; even Hilbert did not and all of us are of considerably lesser width quite apart from the question of depth than Hilbert.
religion complicated truth-is
Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.